Shadow of the Abyss
by Don Orbit
Summary: The Abyssal Fleet. The mysterious enemy that wages war against mankind with seemingly absolute resolve. But where did they come from? How did they come into being? What is it that they want in truth? Really short oneshot. A really old story idea that I had many years ago, but never punlished until now.


_**Shadow of the Abyss**_

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**Disclaimer: I don't own Yu-Gi-Oh! nor Kantai Collection. All rights belong to their respective owners.**

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Billions of years ago, the world had been a flaming inferno. There was no air to breath and no water to drink as all was rock and fire. Streams of molten rock flowed around beneath the thin layer that was the first crust of the planet. After many thousands of years the world cooled down and cluds gathered as the first rain fell on the world for hundreds of years, filling the basins of the first oceans.

And within their depths emerged the first lifeforms. They were small and simple, but they were the first to come into being. With that life came from the water.

Many million years passed by since that day as another being within another dimension observed the history of the world with curious eyes. It was a powerful and wise being of ancient times. It's size alone would have put all other creatures to roam the Earth into shame as they would be nothing but fleas to it. It was the Great Leviathan, a giant sea serpent. Large enough to swallow small islands with one bite and create tsumanis with a whip of it's tail.

The creature had long abandoned the company of other beings as they were mostly afraid of it due it's massive size and horrifying looking appearance. Instead it prefered the solitude and calm and quite of the ocean floor. From it's home in another world it observed how life evolved on the small blue planet as it continued to thrive, grow and even conquered the land. The lifeforms took various and unique shapes, overcame great obstacles and became stronger with every time they did. It was not without a Price though a countless species went extinct again and sometimes life itself stood at the brink of complete annihilation as certain mass extinction events shook the very planet to the core. But life was presistent and clung with teeth and claws onto Survival. Some organisms always survived somewhere and repopulated the planet once again even more than before with the competition being mostly wiped out.

The Leviathan, who had no longer to fight, was watching these primitive lifeforms with almost childish fascination and curiousity. While they also started to settle down on the land, the diversity in the oceans was always the more beautiful for it to watch. At some time he looked at an ocean ruled by beings that slightly reminded itself of it's own, when giant marine reptiles swam through the ocean. But that has been a long time in the past. Now other creatures roamed the seas and the sharks it had watch evolving many millions of years ago still swam through the oceans as the apex predators. It made the Leviathan a bit curious as well.

But one day a creature had come to the waters, that its ancestors had come from long, long time ago. They were naked primates, stood on two legs, had two arms and wore the fur of other creatures to cover their own naked skin. The Leviathan immediately saw something new in these creatures that others it had observed for eons had not possessed to such a degree.

Sentience. These creatures, which later were called humans, were actually beings that were capable of creating tools, art and even many different languages. Sometime later The Great Leviathan actually traveled to Earth and swam through the oceans with glee as it jumped out the water and dove back in like a giant whale. Some humans actually saw this gigantic creature and some even drowned in the waves its careless play had created. The ancient being then rested at the deepest point of the ocean and turned away from the world it had watched so long, content as it was back then.

That was until one day many hundreds of years later something entered its realm in the depths. No other living creature dwelled down in this absolute darkness where no life helped to support life and no hydrothermal springs provided the chemical components and temperature to substain life that didn't even need light. The ancient being stirred in it's sleep as it felt the scent of something unknown and alien in the water. It cracked it's large eyes open as it looked up to see something falling down to where it was. Once it found the alien object its mind halted completely. It was a young human woman, or at least something that looked a lot like one, but gave off a smell that was only partly humane. Clad in strange clothes and having metal strapped to her body, the Leviathan first thought about bringing her back to the surface, but it dismissed the thought as it's logic thinking kicked in.

The water pressure down there was enough to crush a car like a tin can and yet this 'human' appeared completely fine. It didn't heard any cracking of bones like they normally did in these depths nor did it see any injuries from outside. It looked closer at the woman, inching forward slowly to not push her away with the water from its eyes. It then saw that the 'human' was breathing. She was breathing indeed, something completely impossible in any kind of sense. Mammals had no gills and even aquatic ones like manaties or whales had to resurface to breath, but none of them actually breathed underwater. Only fishes and various types of invertebrates did not need to go to the surface to breath.

Now the Leviathan was actually a little bit crept out as it watched the girl's chest rise and fall slightly with every breath she took despite the fact that her lungs were full with water. At this point her body shouldn't even be able to absorb any oxygen from the water anymore. What was this woman? Where did it come from? What had happened to the world while the Leviathan had slept? These and many other questions swirled around in the Leviathan's mind like a vortex as it directed it's eyes up to the entrance of the trench it called it's home.

What the supernatural being saw, when it reared it's massive head out the Mariana Trench, made it stop in it's tracks. Due it's natural connection to the sea itself it pretty much felt the waters scream in silent agony as mankind was now the dominant species on the world. But never before had a race done such artocious things to the nature as it had just done.

The sea was partly poisoned with the wastes of the humans, that made sea creatures ill and die in agonyzing pain over days and weeks. Many of the species the seas had harbored were gone extinct now. Much less fish roamed the waters and once flourishing reefs had become dead husks where only few creatures still dwelled in because they had no other place to go. To make things worse the Leviathan saw more of the 'humans' like the woman down below in the trench laying on the sea floor. It also noted that all of them were for some strange reason female, but it had already made the experience of an entire race having only female individuals.

Some of them were clothed in various styles, others were not. Some looked physically unharmed and others looked badly injured with missing limbs or having slightly decomposed already. Some had machine parts on their bodies, others had them sticking out their flesh like broken bones. Their once red blood had turned into a dark substance due the contamination with heavy metals almost like oil or ink. Around the sea Floor various weapons had been dumped into the ocean that now contaminated the water with deadly chemicals. And the Leviathan heard thousands of angry voices.

Voices of deceased that had died on the seas in hatred, agony and pain. All of them screamed, cursed and damned one another in their never ending wailing. It was as if the ground of the seas had become an amalgation of thousands upon thousands of corpses, each wailing in silent agony and demanding justice to be served as their pleas echoed through the silent waters. And the Leviathan listened to all of it. The first people to die on the sea had been simple hunters, that underestimated the sea and thought of it as some simple small pond. Later came people, who sank with their ships as they were torn apart by storms and currents, dragging them into the depths. Later came those, who died on ships during battles from ancient times when mankind was still in its early steps of civilisation and first great empires. And now there were those that died in battles and were wailing in silent agony as their souls found no rest in their blind rage, forever lost in this dark sea.

Diving back into the depths, the Leviathan found the woman once more as he felt a certain connection to her. No that wasn't right. He felt her connection to the sea and that of her whole kind like he could feel the connection to every marine lifeform to the sea. The Leviathan reached out with its mind to the woman's soul to look through her memories to find out that this 'human' was indeed a ship. He saw battles fought over stupid reasons, costing hundreds of thousands of lives. He saw the humans, that had created her, sink her and raise her again in a body much like that of her creators. He saw them experiment on her and her kind in ways that made the ancient being violently sick. And he saw her being betrayed by the person she loved the most, only to be discarded when she was no longer of use. Simply to be devoured by the unforgiving sea.

The Leviathan felt her anger and rage and it felt with her as it rose up like the molten rock of a volcano before its eruption. Her craving for vengeance was understandable and overwhelming and so was that of her kind.

And so the Leviathan, who had watched the world for millions of years as a mere observer, acted for the first time in the history of the Earth. The god like entity rose the fallen from their watery graves, altered their bodies and gave them knowledge to craft weapons to take revenge for the lives they had been robbed off. It created others for this new kind of beings it had created, more monstrous and animalistic, inspired by the designs of other creatures swimming through the seas, roaming the land and soaring in the air or even the humans, but twisted beyond recognition. Then the first remodeled woman woke up and requested their creator to give them a name. Not knowing anything about such things it allowed it's subjects to decide their own name.

So they chose the name of the 'Abyssals'.

However, the time was not ready yet for an immediate attack, so the Leviathan ordered its children to wait. In that time the humans threw more and more trash and so called "ship girls" as the now abyssals called them into the ocean, raising their enemy's numbers without knowing it. Then a year after the Leviathan had awoken the Great Flood begun.

The giant sea serpent rose from the depths with its "Abyssal Fleet" as it's very appearance caused small islands to be swallowed by the tsunamis and cities at the coasts to be torn apart and dragged into the depths of the ocean. Coastlines were almost completely eroded by the overwhelming power of the sea, that seemed to want to swallow the land once more and drown it into the depths from which it had risen above as well, reshaping entire regions. But that was just hte start as the Leviathan summoned natural disasters that damaged the infrastructure of the human race even more. In midst of this chaos, the Abyssal Fleet attacked. When the giant whirpools, tornadoes and monsun-like rainfalls around the world stopped, most of the global traffic in the sky and the seas had also ceased and the abyssals attacked what remained of mankind's fortresses and forces at the coasts.

It was not a war. It was a one-sided slaughter. A crusade in the name of vengeance, perhaps one of the oldest drives that made sentient beings turn on one another with the intention to kill each other, but an effective one. The entire world's oceans had become a place that now only meant death for mankind. It had become its very enemy. With over 70% of the planet being covered with water, the majority of the planet itself had become like one massive predator to take back mankind into the waters their ancestors had emerged from in form of the first amphibious fishes hundreds of millions of years ago.

With their water ways down soon other problems arose for the nations as they had to fight with refugees from destroyed regions and the lack of rescources to rebuilt everything or to trade with countries far away. Distrust was sowed among the nations as each tried to find their place in this new, destroyed world. Each human life counted in every country in order to bring back stability to the nations as people began to protest and some nations even completely fell apart, while others waged wars against one another about the rescources that were left after the flood.

For a moment it seemed that the Leviathan had won this battle with one solid strike, that hit huamnity in its spine, as it retreated back into the depths of the ocean. It left the abyssals to their own devices to take their revenge on mankind as it was sure that they could do it. With that the Great Levithan went to sleep once more, hoping to wake up in more peaceful times. For some time it really looked like the abyssals were going to destroy humanity as a whole, if mankind wouldn't tear itself apart over what was left after the Great Flood...

...That was until mankind sent the ship girls into the fight against the abyssals and reclaimed large territories and sea ways once more.

Since then it has been a constant tug of war between the ship girls that protected the humans and the abyssals that wanted vengeance on them for what they had done to them and to prevent the further destruction of their home. A war that continued for about 5 years now and was still in a stalemate for both sides. A perverse kind of war in which basically sisters fought sisters with the ship girls being the soldiers and weapons and the abyssals being those that were deemed as failures of horrible experiments and discarded into the depths to cover up the truth from the normal people. For those that knew the truth, that created the ship girls in the first place, it was probably like a global weapon test, watching with glee as their creations tore one another apart and only the strongest emerged victoriously, while they worked on ways to improve their weapons to prevent their own demise in the same heartbeat.

At the same time, the Leviathan kept slumbering. But it was an uneasy one. One that could easily be disturbed. Just with the right trigger.

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**This was a really old story concept I had made in highschool and I just wanted to get it out of my system already, since it had been there for YEARS.**

**I could have gone on and on with the Leviathan creating a new abyssal and giving it the power of the shadow magic, the same as in the original Yu-Gi-Oh! series that allowed all that stuff to go on in ancient Egypt, but I'm too lazy to write that down as well. Originally it was planned to make simply a male abyssal ship, created by altering another creation of the Great Leviathan (so the more monstrous vessels of the Abyssal Fleet) and giving him a deck resolving around WATER monsters or monsters of the types Fish, Sea Serpent and Aqua and the ace monster being Ocean Dragon Lord Neo-Daedalus as well as teaching other abyssals to use those cards. Alternatively there was even an omake to face off with Seto Kaiba instead of the Admiral, but since the idea never developed that far it sunk beneath my brainwaves.**

****You then might ask yourself why to give an abyssal such power in the first place. Well I won't beat around the bush here nor will I sugarcoat it. It is a simple fact that maybe a part of the audience understands.****

****I. HAVE. NO. CLUE. ABOUT. BATTLESHIPS!****

****Seriously nothing. That would be asking me about quantum physics. I don't even know how much firepower such a ship would hold in comparison to other vehicles like fighter jets or tanks and that would also be very objective. I do not know how much damage a ship could actually take before the hull would break or when the weapons would malfunction. It simply is unknown to me.****

****So I simply took something I did know (Duel Monsters) and knew that it would give the fleet girls a hard time to cope with as during that time I was the type of person, that played the evil faction only for the fun of it and added it to the mysterious abyssal fleet along with one of my personally favorite antagonists in the Yu-Gi-Oh! series. ****

****That was however several years ago, I still never managed to get any idea about Naval Warfare and thus I just decided to throw this out of my computer already like a bag of trash. It think if anyone who's more talented and more knowledgeable about Kantai Collection would pick up that idea, they could really make this story work out.****

**I unfortunately cannot. Sorry, but that's how it is. Some things just don't work out.**

**With that, have a nice day and ahoy.**


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